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"A set of apps with constant looks across all the apps and can run in lower system without hardware acceleration and optimized for touchscreen. " is literally the first sentence what about that is unclear

What's the advantage of using mainline over the device kernel, other than mainline simply being newer and perhaps easier to maintain in the long run? Would mainline offer better security? Otherwise, in terms of features, it doesn't seem to me that mainline offers anything significantly new as the Linux kernel has matured

Not entirely Google's fault. The main issue is how ARM devices are made, ie not having a standardised motherboard/bootloader/BIOS like PCs do, which makes having a universal ARM kernel extremely difficult.

The second issue is proprietary drivers from silicon manufacturers (like Qualcomm), they only provide support for 3 years, and that too only against for the kernel that the Android version on that particular device shipped with. Very few of these mainlined (and many of these can't even be mainlined) which means on most devices you can't simply run a mainline kernel to get a fully functional device.

Things have been getting better since the past couple of years though, there's been more emphasis from both Google and Linux maintainers for manufacturers to mainline their code, making it possible to run mainline kernels on more devices - something which Google is quite keen on.

Excuse me, I should have been more precise, you are stuck with the kernel version like 4.4, 5.6, 3.10. Phone manufacturers will give you ( for 1 to 2 years depending of the seriousness of the manufacturer ) minor revisions to fix bug, and security vulnerabilities (4.4.xxx, 5.6.yyy).

Problem is after a couple of years, those kernels aren't maintained anymore by the manufacturer and that can lead to security vulnerabilities. On android that's often not a problem because the userspace is very locked down but on a full OS like pmOS I think it can lead to some security issues.

Also having a really old kernel isn't a good as some software may require new kernel features like new crypto or cgroups functionalities so it could be a good thing if we can run a newer kernel.

Only a few more months now...that five more years of extended support aside.

OTOH I kinda envy you for being a living witness of the death of the late-2000s GTK+2(and pre-Unity Compiz)-dominated world (OK there is Qt3 but I think RHEL6 already had KDE 4). An era which, coming in around the early 2010s into a (GNU/)Linux world where some GTK+(3) apps seemed to be displayed with some GTK+(2) themes in a suspiciously Raleigh-ish fashion for some weird reason, I just missed.

I mean I guess I could just install CentOS 6 on my system and run that for a few months but nah. Don't have a good excuse to

Guys Checkout CoreApps v2.9 release. This are are very light and touch friendly apps. You can use them in your PineBook, PinePhone and PinTab or any other TOUCH devices. All the apps are in Official Manjaro and postmarketOS repo. There are 19 of them for every needs. I hope you guys will like them and give feedback to the developers.

Lots of ways? Mine died from the 5X's boot loop of death. On some of them the BGA soldering was inadequate and the CPU would desolder after about a year of thermal cycling. Mine lasted just under 2 years, and I didn't have a warranty. I don't have a hot-air reflow station so I never fixed it.

Same thing happened to my wife's 5X. I barely managed to do a quick adb pull to save her photos by putting the phone in a freezer and connecting it to a computer via a USB cable. Still have the picture of this "setup" somewhere.

I can see that you are using 4 cores, but the devices has 6[1]. I heard that if you disable the 2x1.8 GHz Cortex-A57 cores you can boot your device and get rid of the bootloop bug[2], that's why you are using only 4 cores?

Er, what's the point of all those alternative OSes if the majority of devices can't do calls with them (I checked the system that Pinephone is based on, most devices can't call, checked postmarket OS device compat list, most devices can't call...)?

I would argue that the point is that we (humanity) needs some alternatives to the mobile platforms reigning over the industry and this is the way that is going to come into existence. These might not be the best thing for every user now, but gradually these alternatives will be used on greater and greater numbers of devices, the way linux (in all of it's shapes and sizes) has gradually gained greater usage on PCs since the 90s. At some point all of them will make calls and no one will remember when they didn't. So maybe these aren't ready for every users purposes today, but if you've got a old spare device and you want to see this day come sooner, please do install and participate (develop, test, etc...).